The good life
Today I started reading -- well, squinting at, twisting my head over, and trying to decipher -- Auden's 1929 Berlin journal. (I've been reading all summer, but this is the first of his journals I've tackled.)
"Oh, the hot stuff!" said the librarian in charge. But alas, the hottest stuff seems to be in the sentences which look to be made entirely out of m's and n's. All I can get is that as he packed to go spend a weekend with some lover or other -- which one can be ascertained from a biography, but not from the squiggles on the page I was reading today -- he took "Donne, the Sonnets, and Lear."
It sounds like an awfully nice way to spend a weekend... but why Lear? Doesn't Lear break the pattern? I don't think he meant Edward.
But that's only the first eight or nine pages, which is all I got through. Maybe it'll get better (or I'll get better at reading it) as I go along. But my current diagnosis is that too much sex with boys picked up in bars has a deleterious effect on the penmanship.
"Oh, the hot stuff!" said the librarian in charge. But alas, the hottest stuff seems to be in the sentences which look to be made entirely out of m's and n's. All I can get is that as he packed to go spend a weekend with some lover or other -- which one can be ascertained from a biography, but not from the squiggles on the page I was reading today -- he took "Donne, the Sonnets, and Lear."
It sounds like an awfully nice way to spend a weekend... but why Lear? Doesn't Lear break the pattern? I don't think he meant Edward.
But that's only the first eight or nine pages, which is all I got through. Maybe it'll get better (or I'll get better at reading it) as I go along. But my current diagnosis is that too much sex with boys picked up in bars has a deleterious effect on the penmanship.